DISPATCHES FROM THE ARID LANDS

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Jim died: Probable cause

I last wrote about Jim Bosold a month ago. He was an acquaintance, someone I saw the few times a week we ate at the same buffet. We’d say hello. That was about the sum of it. Then he died. He fell from a fourth-floor balcony in the apartment complex where he lived in the heart of Phoenix. His friends, the married couple Lee and Louis, did not know for sure what caused the fall.

“Murdered, we suspect,” Lee had said. I wondered, not knowing him well, if he’d taken his life.

I ran into Louis and Lee yesterday at the buffet. The cause of death apparently was something in between murder and suicide. It was an accident, they said. I assume they had seen the autopsy or knew what was in it.

Lee said Jim’s death had to do with his medication. He probably became dizzy, she said, and ended up falling over the railing. This is how such important information reaches us, his friends and well wishers. It dribbles out. Fact or not, it’s usually all we’re left with.

In any case, Jim’s death took a double toll on his friends. His woman friend, Dorothy, was said to be “devastated” by the accident. She has gone to New Mexico to live with or near kin, Lee said. Now instead of the four of them lunching together on Tuesdays at the buffet, it is suddenly only two.

“I still can’t believe it,” said Louis, who was a close friend of Jim’s.

Louis told me Jim was cremated and his remains placed in a cemetery for military veterans at Cave Creek, north of Phoenix.

I also learned Jim has a brother. I would like to talk with the brother and write a fitting obituary. Every person, no matter how insignificant they may seem, deserves recognition for having lived on this heart-breaking planet.